The Former Head Of French Intelligence Says The Toulouse Gunman Was A French Informant

Policemen at work near the
Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, where four people were
killed by a gunman.AP/Bruno
Martin

The gunman who killed seven people may have been an informant for
France's intelligence services, as reported by
Alastair Jamieson at msnbc.com.

Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen of Algerian
origin, shot dead three Muslim soldiers as well
as three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school before
plunging to his death after a 23-hour standoff with police in
an apartment in Toulouse.

The speculation about his connection to French intelligence began
when Yves Bonnet — former head of France’s
counter-espionage service DST — told
the Toulouse
newspaper La Dépêche du Midi that Merah passed
information on to the domestic French intelligence agency
DCRI (i.e. the French equivalent of the FBI):

“He was known to the DCRI, not especially because he
was an Islamist, but because he had a correspondent in domestic
intelligence,” Bonnet said. “When
you have a correspondent, it’s not completely
innocent. This is not trivial.”
(Translation from RT)

Bernard Squarcini, the director of the DCRI , acknowledged that
Merah was interviewed in November 2011 by the DCRI —
because the agency “wanted
to receive explanations about his trip to Afghanistan”
— but strongly denied that Merah was an
informant.

A senior American officer in the southern province of Kandahar in
Afghanistan told the French newspaper Le
Monde that Merah's passport application included trips
to
Israel, then Syria, Iraq and Jordan.

Before Merah was arrested in Kandahar on Nov. 22, 2010,
handed over to NATO forces and subsequently sent back to France,
he had traveled to the Indian consulate in Kandahar to obtain a
visa to visit the country.

In 2011 he spent two months in the Pakistani tribal areas of
North and South Warziristan, a crossroads of the Taliban and
jihadist insurgencies in the region.

Another disturbing factor on the [movement] of Mohamed Merah
remains to be clarified: its presence in Iran "twice" according
to one French military source in Afghanistan.
Questioned by the World on Wednesday, the DCRI, responsible for
counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, has denied this
stay.

Le Monde also quoted Squarcini as saying that Merah asked
for a local DCRI agent by name while he was holed-up in the
apartment surrounded by police.

Squarcini told Le Monde that Merah shocked the female
agent by saying: "Anyway, I was going to call you to say I had
some tip-offs for you, but actually I was going to [kill]
you.”

According to The
Independent, it was this agent – understood to be a
young woman of North African origin – who had interrogated Merah
when he returned from the two-month visit to Pakistan in
November.

Also from the London-based newspaper:

Le Canard Enchaîné newspaper reported yesterday that Merah
and his family were bugged by the DCRI from March to November
last year. The bugging ended abruptly, Le Canard said, at about
the time of the future killer's meeting with the DCRI agent in
November. However, the body which authorizes telephone
surveillance said later that the bugging began in November and
was dropped in February because it revealed nothing
important.